Reading - here - Alex Pavey's illuminating vis-à-vis of Raymond Chandler's The High Window and David Lynch's Lost Highway, I thought I'd look up the maps in the two films based on Chandler's novel (there are no maps in Lost Highway, as far as I can see). Unfortunately The Brasher Doubloon (John Brahm 1947) has no maps, and those I could make out from the rough copy of Time To Kill (Herbert I. Leeds 1942) to be found on YouTube are a disappointment:

These films evoke the topography of Los Angeles not through maps, then, but chiefly through reference to specific addresses. Here are the addresses we can read in Time To Kill:

In The Brasher Doubloon Marlowe's office address is shown on a telegram (see the beginning of this post), and we also see these addresses:

Los Angeles isn't my territory and I haven't investigated these addresses to know if they are all authentic. I know that two in The Brasher Doubloon aren't the names of the places that we are taken to. Elizabeth Murdock's house on 'Dresden Avenue' is in fact the still-standing Rindge House at 2263 South Harvard Boulevard:

And the 'Florence Apartments' where George Anson Philips lives are in fact the now-demolished Gladden Apartments at 100 South Olive Street, Bunker Hill:

Bunker Hill historian Jim Dawson says that, according to Chandlerist Loren Latker, Chandler lived in this building in 1917. The building also appears in the 1952 film The Turning Point, based on a Horace McCoy novel:

The only other exteriors in the two adaptations of The High Window I know anything about are the eponymous locations from which the first husband of Mrs Murdock is defenestrated. In Time To Kill the evidence is - as in Chandler's novel - photographic:

This is the Hall of Justice at 211 West Temple Street (built 1925, still standing):

In The Brasher Doubloon the evidence is cinematographic, a film taken by the blackmailer as he was filming Pasadena's Rose Parade:

This is the Pacific and Southwestern Trust and Savings Bank at 234 East Colorado Boulevard, built 1925 and still standing:

For more on Los Angeles in literature and film see Alex Pavey's website and blog, here.

Wheatley's films are more about Englishness than Britishness. These two maps of the British Isles relegate that larger context to the background. In the cartographic foreground is the credit sequence of Sightseers, marking out a highly localised itinerary, through Worcestershire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Cumbria:

The itinerary, with accompanying maps, can be glimpsed later in the film:

There are three more maps in Sightseers:

(I didn't find any maps in Down Terrace, Kill List or A Field In England.)

I want to show you my maps. I like maps, don't you? They're such useful things when one wants to move about in a hurry. You'll like my maps.

The clue to the identity of the mysterious Dr Fell, the lodger in the Musgrave household, is the mention of a map. That he has a map in his room, marked with crosses, makes a connection with what the investigating journalist has read in Case Histories of Famous Crimes, volume 1:

No one ever saw Jack the Ripper except possibly his victims, none of whom lived to identify him. He was heard running away from the scene of his crimes on several occasions. As he ran, near-witnesses reported hearing a curious sound like a hiss. Apart from that the only other piece of evidence ever discovered was a fragment of a London street map. It was found in Whitechapel near the scene of his last crime.

I haven't found elsewhere any reference to the Ripper's map, and suppose it is an invention of Marjory Allingham's, who wrote the radio play on which the film is based, or else of the scriptwriter John Gilling.

We see Fell's map twice: when the young Miss Musgrave finds it in Fell's room, and later when he shows to old Mrs Musgrave. In the first instance we see the map quite well, and in a better print of the film it might be possible to see what is the place mapped:

As it is, the map's details are hard to make out. We can see that it is marked with crosses, but it is only later, when Fell identifies the places he has marked, do we know that this is supposed to be a map of a part of east London, centred around Whitechapel. A clearer map of the area can be seen in the 2001 Ripper-centred film From Hell:

From Hell (the Hughes Brothers 2001)

Like Dr Fell, the detective in From Hell has marked the locations of the murders on the map with crosses. Johnny Depp's markings don't seem to correspond to the real murder scenes, but then again Dr Fell, in Room To Let, is oddly amiss when he lists their locations:

I wonder if you recognise this, Mrs Musgrave: a byway off Spitalfields, Buck's Court. I made a cross there. Commercial Road. Old Brompton Road. I made a cross there. And look, look Mrs Musgrave: Miller's Court. November the ninth, 1888... Don't these names mean anything to you?

The date he gives is accurate and corresponds to the right place, Miller's Court, where Marie Kelly was murdered. At this point in the film we can be sure that Dr Fell is the Ripper, though this exact chronological match comes at a moment when the topographical matching has just broken down. Unless I have seriously misheard the place name (which is possible), Fell says he has committed a murder in the Old Brompton Road, on the other side of London, in a district that has no association with the crimes of Jack the Ripper.

There are at least two possible explanations for this lapsus. David Cairns at Shadowplay suggests that the actor Valentine Dyall didn't bother to read the script, only his own lines, so perhaps the reference to the Old Brompton Road was an erroneous interpolation on his part, left uncorrected by the director. Alternatively, the topographical incoherence could have been intended by the author or scriptwriter as a signal that the story of Room To Let is not seriously proposed as an explanation of the Jack the Ripper mystery.

In Room To Let there is a topographical incoherence of a different order. The chief setting is the house in which Dr Fell comes to lodge:

The location for the front of the house is 23 Pembridge Square, W.2:

Google Street View, April 2012

The back of the house, however, is an entirely different type of building:

This is Oakley Court, Bray, an early production base for Hammer films, before the company moved to Down Place, just next door. It is now a hotel:

The interiors at Oakley Court were used in Room To Let, even though they seem far too spacious for a town house of the Pembridge Square type. In Man In Black, a Hammer production from 1949, Oakley Court represents what it is, a Victorian Gothic country house:

The interiors of the house in Room To Let can be recognised in Man In Black: